Let's get spiritual: deemed sinners or simply made invisible by their childhood religions, many gays and lesbians are embracing alternative faiths that unabashedly embrace them. Here are three people proving God and gay aren't mutually exclusive.

"HOMOSEXUALITY IS WRONG." For many gay people, the first time they heard their sexuality condemned was as kids in their houses of worship, and it instilled a deep sense of shame that took a lifetime to undo. It's no surprise then that members of the LGBT community often choose to leave their faith behind when they come out of the closet.

Still, for spiritually minded LGBT people, what options remain? We talked to three gays and lesbians who grew up in churchgoing or synagogue-going families but have embraced alternative religions since coming out. None of the three religions--Kabbalah, Buddhism, and Agape--are gay-specific, but all are attracting LGBT people in increasing numbers. Can they really offer a home without judgment?

DAVID ASCHE Kabbalah 

IF ANYONE STILL DOUBTS MADONNA'S INFLUENCE, meet David Asche. After gushing about the Material Girl's latest album, the Los Angeles resident begins to talk about Kabbalah, the religion he's been studying for the last four years. Naturally, the pop star led him to it. "I saw her video for 'Die Another Day,'" he explains, "and at the end of it were these three Hebrew letters in fire. I was, like, What the fuck is that?"

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Raised a Reform Jew, the 32-year-old Asche scribbled the letters onto his hand and reported to work waiting tables, where a customer took note and prodded him in the direction of L.A.'s Kabbalah Center. Curious, Asche showed up at the center's Shabbat services "with a teal polo on, collar flipped up, flip-flops with bright pink toenails, and money signs airbrushed onto my big toes," he recalls, laughing. "I walked in all 'Yo, yo, what's up?' to a room full of men dressed all in white."

Asche soon embraced the pared-down lifestyle, enrolling in Kabbalah courses where he found himself within spitting distance of his pop idol (though the Kabbalah Center separates men and women during classes, Asche says Madonna always participates from the men's side). Still, he notes, "if you're really there just to see Madonna, you're not going to stay very long. It's a lot of work; it's hard. You have to look at yourself and your soul."

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And what has he found there? "Kabbalah changed my entire life, basically," Asche says. "It's made me accept more responsibility." He points to his left arm, recently scarred from an accidental fire in his apartment. "Like, I got these burns, right? In the past, I would have been, like, Fuck that, that's fucked-up, but now I'm, like, What did I do? What am I supposed to learn from this?"

Though Asche says he's far from the only gay man at Kabbalah ("Thanks, Madonna! It's literally like a boyfest"), he does offer a few disclaimers. "They're weird about gay people. I can't put words in their mouth, but they consider it an other tikkun"--the Hebrew word meaning "repair"--"so it's something a person has to work through."

Asche remembers a conversation he had with a member of the chevre, an inner circle of Kabbalah volunteers. "It was explained to me that everything's a circuit; everything is positive and negative. A man and a woman together are positive and negative, but two men are two positives, so they cause a spark and don't create a full circuit."

Though the conversation annoyed him, Asche says it wasn't enough to make him forsake Kabbalah entirely. "As with anything, you have to sort of cherry-pick what you want out of it," he says. "The teachings are awesome, but I feel like the center itself is a little weird. It's a little bit like, 'We're not judgmental--but we're judgmental.'"

He recalls that when he first began taking classes, he received weekly calls from a Kabbalah Center member asking him to purchase the Zohar (a group of pricey Kabbalah texts) and tithe 10% of his income to the religion. "I wasn't even working," Asche says. "I was like, 'I have no money! Ten percent of zero is zero!'" Still, the Kabbalah member encouraged him to say out loud that he would make $10,000 in the next month and give $1,000 back to the center.

Two weeks later a friend made a business proposal to David that soon netted him $10,000. Newly convinced, Asche tithed the center $1,200, and he has continued to study Kabbalah ever since: "Maybe now I should say 'I want to tithe $20,000 to the center!'"

SKIP JENNINGS Agape 

"IF GOD MADE ME, and I understand that God is love, then I must be love," says Skip Jennings, stretching out in the backyard of his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City. Easygoing, fit, and sporting an olive T-shirt that declares CHANGE YOUR KARMA, Jennings speaks like a man who's got it all figured out (he advertises his services as a life coach). Though the 44-year-old credits much of his outlook to Agape, a fast-rising transdenominational L.A.-area church, the spiritual journey that led Jennings there was a long time coming. "All my life," he says, "I was searching for that thing that connects you to God."

Born into a family of strict Southern Baptists, Jennings always knew he was different. "Then I became aware that I was gay, and I realized that s what it was, he says. "The church didn't approve of me, didn't like me, and in some ways even hated me." Attending high school in New Jersey, Jennings came out briefly until his family's angry reaction forced him back into the closet. He soon found a girlfriend and even converted to her Mormon faith, but as the only black man in the congregation, Jennings still felt "different." He abandoned the Mormonism soon after high school.

A subsequent move to New York City provided him with a fresh start as an actor and dancer, though the peripatetic Jennings couldn't stay still for long. "I got tired of it all," he explains. On the advice of his mother, he signed up to be a personnel specialist for the Air Force, expecting a brand-new adventure. "I went into the military thinking, Travel, great pay, get to see the world. It was none of that," he says, laughing.

Soon after he was shipped off to a base in Hawaii, Jennings embraced the evangelical Christian movement. Still conflicted about his sexuality, he called upon the church to cure his homosexual impulses. "In one laying of hands, one ceremony, I regained my 'straightness,'" he says. "I truly believed, OK, this is the way I'm going to live. No matter how I feel, God wants me to live this way." For a time Jennings felt he was successfully doing so--he even got engaged to a woman--but his sexuality proved too difficult to suppress. Eventually, word start to spread that Jennings was gay, and after he confirmed it to his supervisors, he was honorably discharged in 1989.

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His engagement and career over, Jennings fled to Ireland, where he finally began to live as an openly gay man in Dublin. "I thought that this would be my damnation, but at that point I really didn't care," he says. Later he decided to research the Bible on his own in an attempt to reconcile his homosexuality with his belief in God, and what he found calmed many of his fears. "There was nothing Jesus said [against] being gay or that it was an abomination," he says, likening the biblical translation process to a game of telephone. "Look at the King James Bible--King James was a gay king. A lot of the digs that the translators put in there about homosexuality were digs toward him."

Jennings found further acceptance when he moved to California in 1998 and began attending an all-gay church in Laguna Beach. "It was the first time I had really accepted my gayness without any reservations. Once you get to that place in your life where you can accept who you are no matter what, a whole new world expands and a whole new consciousness starts happening in your spirit." Still, he had qualms about staying in a congregation reserved only for gays and lesbians. "I felt like I was ghettoizing myself," he says. "What I knew to be true was that we're all one; we're not separate."

Jennings finally felt that message confirmed when a new boyfriend--now his partner, Bill--brought him to Agape on their second date. Founded by Reverend Michael Beckwith, Agape combines elements of the Gospels, progressive causes, and New Age awakening. Beckwith even appears on the best-selling spiritual DVD The Secret. It's a formula to which Jennings immediately responded. "The message I get from Agape is, what we identify as--gay, straight, black, white--is the external, but what really matters is our connection to the internal," says Jennings.

In the two years he's been a member of Agape, Jennings has thrown himself into the church, manning Agape's LGBT tent on Sundays (across from tents reserved for vegans and straight singles). He's studying to go into Agape's school of ministry, the University of Transformational Studies. "I'm being called to help other gays and lesbians understand who they are," he says. Has the man who's spent his entire life searching for a spiritual home finally settled down? He smiles. "My pathway has always been God and studying and wanting to go deeper. When I got to Agape, I realized, Well, this is it. This is what I've been looking for all my life."

HELEN WORTHAM Buddhism

SHAVED HEADS. LEVITATION. Karate-chopping monks. Until a fateful trip to the bookstore five years ago, those were the things that came to mind when Helen Wortham thought about Buddhism. Then the 42-year-old happened past a copy of The Naked Buddha and, intrigued by the title, gave it a look.

"It was a nice little nonassuming, nonscary book, and it really spoke in elegant, simple language about Buddhism," says Wortham, who was quickly won over by author Adrienne Howley, an Australian Buddhist monk. "I just picked it up and couldn't put it down, and I thought, Wow, I have all these stereotypes about what I thought Buddhists were, and that's not it at all."

Still, not all her preconceptions proved easy to shake. Though she continued to study Buddhism on her own, Wortham avoided group meetings, worried that she wouldn't be able to relate to more experienced Buddhists. Finally, a desire to learn more about meditation led her to attend a Philadelphia-area group studying Shambhala Buddhism.

"I really expected all these kung fu masters with long beards, and everybody sitting cross-legged and having lots of wrinkles and being very wise," Wortham admits. "And what I saw was this young girl who used meditation to fix her golf swing and an old woman who found meditation through gardening."

The spectrum of Buddhist followers and their casual approach to religion was new to Wortham, who had grown up in a conservative Christian family in Dallas. "I never felt like I had the fire and brimstone," she says, eschewing her church's rigid heaven-and-hell outlook. The fact that Wortham was a lesbian didn't help matters. "Even if in my church I wasn't told 'Hey, you're gay and you're going to hell'--there was a big bulletin board from the Southern Baptists telling me that across the street."

Now a medical and scientific illustrator in suburban Philadelphia, Wortham says that Buddhism better suits her lifestyle. "The idea is that they don't push anything on you--take it or leave it, take what you want, and if it seems to fit you and it feels right, great! I love that attitude."

She also likes Buddhism's attitude toward her sexuality. Though Wortham admits she's unfamiliar with any official Buddhist doctrine on homosexuality, she points out that the diversity section on the Shambhala website features a picture of a same-sex couple. She's mentioned her own relationship while at her meditation group, "and no one blinked or anything."

Wortham's even encouraged her girlfriend, Mary Beth (whom she describes as a "recovering Catholic"), to begin meditating, though Mary Beth hasn't yet embraced the Buddhist faith. "I wonder sometimes what she really thinks deep down inside," says Wortham. "I don't think she's willing to let go--I don't know if it's the guilt or ceremony of Catholicism or what. It's very hard; I still have times where I wrestle with Christianity too. The punishment of hell is very hard to think about when you're raised as a conservative Protestant or Catholic."

Still, Wortham has nothing but kind words when discussing Mary Beth's aunt, a Catholic nun. "I have the most wonderful conversations with her," she says. "When I talk to her, I really realize that for truly spiritual people, it doesn't matter if you call them Catholic or Buddhist. They get it."

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